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Analyzing Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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Ride-hailing services are not the principle cause of transit ridership decline, according to a new report from TransitCenter, a New York-based transit cheerleading group. This is based on a survey of 1,700 people in seven different urban areas.

Comparing the results with a similar survey from three years before, the group found a large increase in automobile ownership and that people who increased the number of trips they took by auto decreased the number of trips they took by transit. However, people surveyed who increased their use of ride-hailing services actually increased transit ridership, so TransitCenter concluded that increased auto ownership, not ride hailing, is the cause of transit’s problems.

A major problem with the study is that the people surveyed were not randomly selected — if they were, most of them wouldn’t have been transit riders. The amount of self-selection in the survey biases the results and says little about why the people who weren’t selected for the survey don’t ride transit — and their reasons may be completely different from those who were selected. Continue reading →

2018 Transit Ridership Down 2.0 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in 2018 was 2.0 percent less than in 2017, according to the December 2018 monthly data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Led by a 2.5 percent decline in heavy-rail ridership, total rail ridership actually declined by more than bus ridership: 2.1 percent vs. 2.0 percent.

The 2018 decline follows three straight years of previous losses, resulting in a total 8.5 percent fall since 2014. Between 2017 and 2018, ridership declined in 35 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, and since 2014 it declined in all but four: Houston, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Raleigh.

In November’s ridership report, the Antiplanner noted that commuter-rail numbers for Boston, New York, and a few other cities appeared to be incomplete, resulting in an apparent 15 percent decline in total commuter-rail ridership from November 2017. The December release corrects those data, revealing that total commuter-rail ridership in November didn’t fall at all, but it didn’t really increase either, gaining less than 0.05 percent. Commuter rail fell by 0.2 percent in December and was flat for the year as a whole. Continue reading →

“Fundamental Human Right” or Desperate Attempt to Justify More Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
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“We don’t pay for elevators, do we? And rightly so. The very idea is preposterous. Yet the public transit system plays the same role in the city, only sideways,” says James Prince, co-editor of Free Public Transit. Urban transit, Prince argues, is a “fundamental human right and public good.”

No, actually, it isn’t either a human right or a public good. A public good is something from whose benefits no one can be excluded. National defense is the classic example; arguably, storm sewers are a public good as well. But it is easy to exclude people from transit. Continue reading →

Public Transit for Others

By | | Transportation
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More than eighteen years ago, the Onion reported that “98 percent of commuters favor public transit for others” so that everyone else can drive on uncongested roads. That hasn’t changed, as in 2016 Los Angeles overwhelming voted for measure M, which will spend $120 billion on transit improvements, yet ridership there has dropped from 600 million trips in 2016 to 550 million annual trips in 2018.

To find out why this is happening, UCLA researcher Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning, did a survey of 1,450 Los Angeles-area voters and found out the Onion was right: very few voters supported the transit tax because they expected to ride transit. Instead, nearly 70 percent of supporters voted for it because they thought it would relieve congestion and reduce air pollution.

“In truth, taming traffic isn’t what transit does best,” observes CityLab in its review of Manville’s study. “Done right, it brings low-cost, efficient mobility to the masses, even when the roads are jammed.” But spending $120 billion on high-cost, low-capacity transit lines is hardly the definition of “done right.” Continue reading →

End the Shutdown Now!

By | | Transportation
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The government shutdown has reduced DC Metro ridership by 25 percent and Metro revenues by $400,000 a day. This has led senate Democrats to demand an end to the shutdown in order to save Metro. After all, as everyone knows, the main purpose of the federal government is to provide customers to transit agencies like Metro.

The senators representing Maryland and Virginia — Ben Cardin, and Chris Van Hollen, Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine — have issued a joint statement calling the shutdown “wasteful” and “destructive.” “At a time when Metro already is undertaking substantial, disruptive projects to improve safety and reliability,” they said, “President Trump’s shutdown is jeopardizing the health and stability of the entire Metro system.”
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But what better time to shut down the government than when Metro is doing “disruptive” projects? Should Trump have waited until everything was fixed to shut it down? (As if that’s ever going to happen.) The reality is that Metro itself is wasteful and destructive, and when it has a $25 billion maintenance backlog the addition or subtraction of $400,000 a day isn’t going to make much difference.

The APTA Solution to Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association issued a press release last week announcing that transit ridership in the third quarter of 2018 had declined, something that will not be news to Antiplanner readers. But APTA held out some glimmerings of hope.

Among other success stories cited by APTA, Grand Rapids transit rejuvenated ridership on its least-used bus route, increasing boardings from 50 rides a day to 1,100. Riverside Transit in California increased its ridership by 2 percent. How did they accomplish this? Grand Rapids quadrupled service and cut fares to zero. Riverside cut fares to 25 cents. Other transit agencies, such as Seattle’s Sound Transit, saw modest ridership gains after boosting service.

In short, the key to transit’s recovery is to increase costs and decrease revenues. This must be the reasoning behind the streetcar movement: streetcars have much higher capital, operating, and maintenance costs than buses and most streetcars are so poorly utilized that many cities give away rides for free. APTA data doesn’t separate streetcars from light rail, but FTA third-quarter data show that streetcar ridership has grown 18 percent in the last five years, mainly because so many new streetcar lines have opened. However, ridership fell between 2017 and 2018, so the transit industry needs to keep opening new high-cost, low-revenue lines to keep up the momentum. Continue reading →

November Transit Ridership Down 5.3%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2018 was 5.3 percent lower than in the same month of 2017, according to data (7.4-MB Excel spreadsheet) released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. Both buses and rail lost more than 5 percent of their riders. These declines are in spite of November having the same number of work days in both years.

The first eleven months of 2018 saw 2.6 percent fewer riders than the same months in 2017. Contrary to claims that bus ridership is declining but rail is not, rail ridership actually declined more in 2018 than bus ridership.

However, it is worth noting that some of the commuter rail numbers are preliminary estimates that don’t look right. Though commuter rail has been doing better than most other modes in previous months, the November report indicates a 15 percent decline from November 2017. Supposedly, Boston commuter ridership fell by 45%, New York’s Metro North, Philadelphia DOT, and commuter lines in Connecticut, south Florida, and San Diego all lost 33 to 35%, and Los Angeles lost 25%. Yet other commuter-rail lines seem unaffected. If these numbers turn out to be in error, I’ll post an update here as soon as possible. Even without commuter rail, heavy rail and light rail both declined, though not by quite as much as bus. Continue reading →

Why Public Transit Is Crumbling

By | | Transportation
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Someone over at the Nib has a lengthy explanation of why public transit is crumbling. Apparently, it’s due mainly to the Koch Brothers and the Antiplanner. While it would have been more realistic picturing me on a bicycle than behind the wheel of a car, I am nonetheless flattered; yet the reality is a little bit more complicated.

The article — okay, it’s a web comic — suggests that transit can somehow transform cities into clean, healthy, crime-free paradises. Light-rail lines, the authors suggest, fall short of this dream because they generally don’t have a dedicated right of way and therefore “aren’t fast or reliable and don’t carry enough passengers to reduce traffic.” Thus, they explicitly endorse “rapid transit,” meaning bus or rail lines that have their own dedicated rights of way.

While transit had an impact on American cities before the automobile became ubiquitous and more recently has had similar impacts on cities in developing countries that still have low rates of auto ownership, there’s little evidence that dedicated transit lines can transform auto-oriented cities. Indeed, heavy investments in transit have had negligible effects on cities other than by increasing the tax burden on their citizens. Continue reading →

BART: The Bay Area Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Ridership on the $1.2 billion Bay Area Rapid Transit line to San Francisco Airport — which was never very high in the first place — has declined by 10 percent since 2013, which translates to a $4 million annual loss in fare revenues. Ridership on the $500 million BART-funded cable car to the Oakland Airport, which was also well below expectations, declined by 6 percent in the past two years, equal to about $620,000 in lost revenues.

BART blames ride hailing services for the loss in business, claiming that no one could have predicted the rise in such services when the agency planned these lines. Ride hailing is very predictable now (hindsight being 20:20), yet BART is still planning new lines, including an extension to Livermore, a second transbay crossing, and of course the line to downtown San Jose.

To pay for these new lines, as well as reconstruction of existing lines, BART asked voters to approve $3.5 billion in new funding in 2016 — and spent two years and an unknown amount of tax dollars promoting the ballot measure (without actually mentioning the measure) with the slogan “it’s time to rebuild.” It also failed to report these expenditures in a campaign filing statement, for which it was fined a whopping $7,500 by the state Fair Political Practices Commission. As one voter noted, “that’s not a fine; that’s a fantastic investment.” Continue reading →

VTA Faces $25 Million Deficit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which the Antiplanner has sometimes called the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, is facing a $25 million deficit next year, which will probably lead to service cuts. As the Friends of Caltrain (the commuter rail line that connects San Jose to San Francisco) note, the elephant in the room is whether VTA should go forward with its plans for billions of dollars of capital projects when it can’t afford to run the system it already has.

Friends of Caltrain doesn’t specifically say so, but the real elephant is VTA’s plans to extend the BART line to downtown San Jose. VTA is “97 percent complete” building a 10-mile line from Fremont to Berryessa (a neighborhood in north San Jose). This line, which is costing $2.3 billion, was supposed to be open at the beginning of 2018, but thanks in part to a scandal over a contractor’s use of used parts in construction, the opening has been delayed until late 2019. (An update from Friends of Caltrain says the VTA board was willing to look at capital projects, but still did not specifically mention BART.)

Extending the line another 6.5 miles to downtown San Jose is expected to cost another $4.7 billion, or more than $720 a mile, mainly because much of it will be underground. VTA expects to ask the Federal Transit Administration to cover $1.5 billion of this amount, leaving local taxpayers to cover the rest. If this project is ever completed, BART riders arriving in downtown San Jose are likely to find a stripped-down transit system that probably won’t take them where they want to go if it is more than a couple of blocks from the BART station. Continue reading →